Clinton charity releases donor list

Norway, Oman among foreign nations that have donated since foundation's start

Jan. 2, 2010 12:00 AMAssociated Press

WASHINGTON - Foreign countries including Norway and Oman contributed to former President Bill Clinton's charity, and donors including Donald Trump, multinational soft-drink company Coca-Cola and singer Elton John's foundation also pitched in as Hillary Clinton served her first year as secretary of State.

A donor list released on New Year's Day by the William J. Clinton Foundation shows that in all, Norway has given $10 million to $25 million to the charity since its founding roughly a decade ago. Oman gave $1 million to $5 million over the years.

The list gave cumulative donation totals and didn't say how much each contributor gave last year.

The foundation provided the Associated Press with a donor list Friday morning under the heading "William J. Clinton Foundation Publishes Names of 2009 Contributors on Foundation Website" but later said the disclosure, which included many more foreign governments, covered donors dating back to the charity's inception, and that it wouldn't identify who gave in 2009.

The Clintons agreed to annually disclose the names of donors to the foundation to address concerns about potential conflicts of interest between the former president's fundraising abroad and his wife's role in helping direct Obama administration foreign policy.

Then-President-elect Barack Obama made the disclosure a condition of his selection of Hillary Clinton for the post, and the two senior lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind., said when the first list was released in December 2008 that the disclosure "is designed to establish greater transparency and predictability with regard to the activities of the Clinton Foundation in the context of Sen. Clinton's service as secretary of State."

The William J. Clinton Foundation works in the United States and around the world on such issues as health care, particularly HIV/AIDS; climate change and economic development.

It also runs the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Ark., which includes Clinton's presidential library.

Several foreign governments that appeared in the foundation's first disclosure in December 2008 didn't give last year, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Brunei.

In releasing the list Friday, the foundation didn't identify individual contributors' employers, nationalities or any other details.

It gave only cumulative ranges rather than precise donations and didn't provide a fundraising total.

But it did say that more than 90 percent of the gifts it received last year were in donations of $250 or less.

The 2009 donors included three who ranked as the foundation's all-time biggest givers, topping $25 million each since Bill Clinton founded the charity: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Canadian mining tycoon and Radcliffe Foundation chief executive Frank Giustra, and UNITAID.